Various approaches for supporting the driver of a vehicle in parking are known from the state of the art.
German Patent DE 100 45 616 A1 describes a method of operating a display system according to the preamble of Claim 1. In this method, distance sensors are additionally provided for measuring the parking place. Based on these measured data, the controller then evaluates whether the parking place is sufficient for parking the vehicle. If this is the case, a parking strategy is calculated automatically so that the vehicle can be steered into the parking place. One disadvantage of this known method is the extremely high cost of providing the required system of distance sensors which is necessary to be able to reliably measure the size of the parking place. In addition, there are a number of product liability issues with this system because if errors occur due to the measurement by the distance sensors, damage can easily occur to other vehicles or to the driver's own vehicle.
German Patent 101 61 316 A1 discloses another parking support system. With this system, the driver may select a suitable mode depending on the particular parking situation, in which case a prestored scenery is displayed on the screen, depending on the mode selected. Then the position of the driver's own vehicle relative to the prestored scenery is altered on the screen in accordance with the subsequent movements of the vehicle. However, this support system functions satisfactorily only when the actual starting position of the vehicle corresponds to the starting position of the vehicle stored temporarily in this scenery. To guarantee this, it is proposed there that suitable sensor systems be used to measure the parking place. As an alternative to that, it is proposed now that the driver be put in a position through suitable direction finding aids to bring the actual starting position into correspondence with the starting position in the scenery, which has been stored temporarily. One disadvantage of this system is that it is impossible to reliably guarantee a correspondence between the actual starting position and the starting position stored temporarily in the scenery that is actually sufficiently accurate.